CCRES

The Capturing Coral Reef & Related Ecosystem Services (CCRES) project seeks to unlock the natural wealth of coastlines in the East Asia-Pacific to enhance livelihoods and food security, improve community health and wellbeing, and sustain coastal ecosystems in the region.

The project demonstrates how coastal communities in the developing world can sustainably capture the benefits of ecosystem services. It seeks to make explicit the value of “blue” natural capital and ecosystem services to coastal communities and other stakeholders in the management of a country’s natural assets for sustainable development.

The project will demonstrate the fundamental relationship between the ecological value of healthy coral reef, seagrass and mangrove ecosystems and the economic value and market potential of their ecosystem services. It will explore how these are tied to healthy, resilient systems; and how routine distribution of economic benefits can bring transformational change in sustaining the wellbeing of coastal communities.

By making the connections to values and benefits explicit, CCRES will demonstrate the fundamental links between - and the need to maintain and conserve - healthy ecosystems and the economic benefits derived from ecosystem services.

The project will forge community-led innovations in capturing and sustaining these benefits by generating model frameworks for business development (or by strengthening the value chains of existing businesses) linked to ecosystem services to better highlight and harvest the values accruing from the ecosystems on which their business success depends.